The present invention relates to improvements in suppression of spray produced by motor vehicles, and particularly to a mud flap having a spray suppressant surface configuration.
As a motor vehicle, for example a large truck, travels on a wet roadway surface, its wheels pick up fluid from the roadway surface, and such fluid is thrown out by the tires in the form of spray. Such fluid, and the splashing and spray resulting therefrom, may originate as rainwater, slush from snow, melting ice, mud, and the like. When this spray is thrown against a solid surface on the vehicle, it may be deflected or spattered into smaller droplets. As droplets rebound from solid surfaces on the vehicle they are likely to be caught by turbulent air surrounding the vehicle, to be carried in various directions, to be splashed against nearby vehicles, or to be suspended as mist, producing annoying or dangerous conditions of poor visibility in the immediate vicinity of such a vehicle. Thus such splash and spray produced by a large moving vehicle is annoying to vehicles following or alongside, and may impede the vision of the drivers of such vehicles or obscure the other vehicles from the driver of such a large vehicle, often leading to collisions between vehicles.
With increasing numbers of vehicles present on the highways, and with highways having greater roadway width, the total amount of fluids likely to be present on the roadway surface and available to be dispersed as spray has increased. This makes the resultant limitations of visibility an increasingly dangerous problem for drivers.
In order to reduce the amount of such splash and spray produced or thrown up in the way of following vehicles, large vehicles are required to have mudflaps hanging behind their wheels. Conventional mudflaps, however, have a relatively hard, generally planar surface facing toward the wheels of a vehicle. Such a large planar surface generally merely deflects and splatters streams of impinging droplets thrown from the wheels of the vehicle, allowing such droplets and spray to be suspended in the air and blown about, and the droplets continue to contribute to mist and spray in the turbulent air surrounding the vehicle.
An improved type of spray-reducing flap is disclosed in Reddaway U.S. Pat. No. 3,899,192, which teaches the provision of a plurality of elongate, resilient blade elements distributed over the surface of a flap. The blade elements project outwardly from the flap, extending generally toward the wheels of a vehicle in random, angular, crossing relationship to each other, to present a tangled mass of such blade elements for the purpose of absorbing and draining away fluid which strikes the flap.
Such a tangled mass of blade elements, however, has been found to retain mud, snow, and ice to an undesirable degree, and once appreciable amounts of mud or ice have been trapped in such a surface it has a much lower efficiency for reducing the amount of spray in the vicinity of the wheel.
It is therefore a primary objective of the present invention to provide for use on a motor vehicle a flap which has an improved capability to receive spray emanating from a vehicle and to convert the spray into a relatively confined fluid stream, rather than a large volume of spray.
It is another principal objective of the present invention to provide an improved spray-suppressant material which is less likely than previously known spray-suppressant materials for vehicle flaps to retain mud, snow, and ice during use.
It is a principal feature of the present invention that is includes a pattern of groups of tapered flexible fingers arranged upon a generally planar base surface, in which the adjacent groups of such flexible fingers define channels along the base surface for carrying away fluid and allowing the fluid to drop upon a road surface, rather than being blown into the air surrounding the vehicle as spray.
It is another feature of the present invention that it provides a pattern of flexible fingers extending from a base surface toward a source of spray and presenting a relatively large surface area upon which spray can impinge at an angle which will result in a minimized amount of fluid rebounding into the air as spray.
It is an important advantage of the present invention that it provides splash suppressing flaps, and materials for use in constructing such flaps, which are less likely than previously known splash-suppressing flaps to retain an accumulation of mud, snow, or ice.